Devil's Fork

by Spencer Adams

CHAPTER 16

  WEDNESDAY

  Wuhan, China

  NATPAC sat at his desk, eating lunch. He ate lightly. His attention was on his computer and on the events that he expected to unfold the following evening. If they caught this operative, he thought, they could figure out the full extent of what the CIA and NIS knew. There was a small chance the CIA knew where the facility was. But there was no way they understood what was in there, or that Chinese interests were involved.

  They probably just think they discovered a secret nuclear weapons research facility.

  That’s good, he thought, let them think that. That would give them a nice scare. If we catch this person, whoever he is, we can check that they don’t know what that place really is. We can see if they suspect the global extent of what we were doing, he thought. But then he reminded himself that the CIA might not even know about the base at all. He stood up slowly, walked over to his window, and tightened his shades more.

  This was just one more piece in the machine, NATPAC thought. It was one more step that would help China and its leaders as it climbed back towards superpower status. His friends across the border were facilitators or helpers. This was as much China’s project as theirs.

  NATPAC sat back and thought how brilliant China’s rise had been. Everyone thought he had the best team of hackers, but he thought the best hackers were China’s leaders. They had successfully hacked the world economy. That impressed him more than even SLOTHMAN’s successes at hacking various parts of the US Government. What the leaders had done was so simple and brilliant and it happened right under the nose of the world. It was a glitch only China saw.

  He remembered studying it in an economics seminar. When China opened up trade in the late 1970s, its economy was relatively small and did not produce many goods that the world wanted. So the leaders started printing money, causing inflation. Inflation meant that China’s currency was being devalued against other world currencies, including the US Dollar. This caused Chinese goods to become far cheaper than similar goods produced anywhere else. The cost of making a product in China became a small fraction of the cost to make it anywhere else – because materials were now cheap and labor wages were now especially cheap. So the rest of the world reacted predictably – they started getting all of their goods from China. It did not happen all at once, but set in slowly, as China’s currency kept devaluing. As China exported more goods to the rest of the world, its economy began growing at a fast pace. And here was the catch – as people abroad, mainly Americans, bought Chinese goods, they paid for them in dollars. The companies exporting these goods wanted to convert the dollars back into Chinese currency. So the Chinese government stepped in and gladly gave them Chinese currency, which the government had freshly printed in abundance. The government took in exchange, the US Dollars. In this way, the Chinese economy continued to grow and importantly, the Chinese government accumulated a growing hoard of US Dollars, called foreign reserves. The Chinese government was slowly becoming the richest entity in the world. The last time NATPAC checked, he had read that China had several trillion dollars in foreign reserves, and growing. All it had required was printing currency to artificially keep the exchange rate low. It also required a large, cheap labor force. The factories producing all of these goods needed many workers. NATPAC knew they worked in near-slave conditions, but it was justified he thought. It was their service to getting China towards superpower status. This system allowed China to grow without needing to create any innovation and without developing anything new.

  It was such a simple hack, he thought. Generally countries wanted what they called “strong” currency. It was a silly way to call it, he thought. As a country’s currency was gaining in value, its economy would not be able to grow by manufacturing goods and selling them abroad. This was because that country’s products would be too expensive for the rest of the world. But an artificially low currency, fueled only by printing money, allowed a country to sell to the world and accumulate dollars. NATPAC was mainly mesmerized by this hack because of the massive scale on which it was being done.

  NATPAC smiled every time he saw American movies and the consumer culture they encouraged. On TV, he saw Americans buying everything they could. They shopped for new clothes every month. They had many cars and seemed to always buy a new one. They all wanted multiple computers, cell phones, refrigerators and toys. Advertisers had Americans in the palm of their hand – telling them such paradoxical nonsense as “save more, buy now!” He saw an American car advertisement on the internet once. His computer started yelling and shouting and barking to buy a car immediately. NATPAC almost felt a heart attack set in, but steadied himself. He now smiled at the brilliance. As they scrambled to keep buying as much as they could, they were buying it all from China. We were getting richer, he thought. When explaining this concept to some of his team, NATPAC often alluded to the Japanese martial art of Aikido. He did not like Japan very much nor its martial arts. But he liked the central concept taught in Aikido. Instead of meeting an attacker head on and trying to out-punch him, Aikido practitioners used their opponents’ force against them. As the opponent was kicking, Aikido masters knew how to step aside and redirect the kick so that the attacker became unbalanced and fell.

  That was step one – produce the goods and fan the flames of runaway consumerism. That was the first act of China’s rise and it was genius, he thought. NATPAC grew anxious as he remembered that he needed to be a part of this rise. He needed to be a part of Acts 2 and 3. Tonight’s activities would get him closer to that goal, he thought anxiously. China’s Act 2 was even more brilliant than Act 1.